A recounting of how I was introduced to my favorite drink.

A bit of context

The US is an awesome place. The world is a literal planet full of wonderful cultures, customs, languages, musics, and peoples – and the US is a relatively open garden which generally cultivates and cross-polinates all of these wonderful things. Of course not all of the US is like this, but it is generally a melting pot where you can experience the world in a very geographically dense place. I grew up in Chicago as the product of an American architect and Indian architect. My childhood friends came from all over the world: various parts of the US, all over India, Trinidad, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, Turkey, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, Russia, Poland, Italy, Spain, Mongolia, Fiji, The Philippines, Jamacia, The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Belize, Brasil, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Algeria, Morocco, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

This environment, coupled with the “raw-ness” of Chicago, has left me with a lifelong interest in learning about all the awesome facets of the places that mark this planet. It is with this keenly interested lens that I mosied into a small Korean bar situated on the north side of Austin, Texas – and north Austin is where my little story begins.

The Main Story

In the spring of 2023, I had recently moved from Chicago to the great state of TEXAS. As a “city boy” I moved to Austin to enjoy its mix of “Texas-Texas”, techies, and iced lattes. Austin is a brilliant city, and as a foodie I sniffed out some fantastic food. If you’re in Austin and hungry, I highly recommend:

At the time I was doing some remote machine learning work out of a small studio apartment up in The Domain. It was a mid-spring Friday, the day’s sky was mostly gloomy with interspersed bouts of rain. I spent the day hacking till about 7 PM, as all weeks in a startup it was one of “character building” and I decided to “fuck off” and enjoy a nice dinner – the kind where you can exhale thoroughly and droop your shoulders in a chair with a relaxed smile. For such a dinner, there are many suitable candidates! On this evening though I was interested in sneaking back to a little spot I had discovered some weeks before – a small and characterful Korean bar run by three older ladies, one of whom I hit it off with as a drinking buddy. Clearly when you are exhausted and in need of a morale boost, you should drink something audacious, eat something spicy, laugh about silly things, and permit yourself loudly express yourself. I busted out the door of my apartment, opened the door to my Mustang, and was off.

I rocked up to the spot around 7:45 PM – you would think a pretty great bar on a Friday would be packed, but on this evening it was completely empty save for the three ladies. Our friends for the evening were seated towards the back of the main room, lazed around a table with beers (“getting high on their own supply”). When I entered the door, my main friend who typically goes by “Sarah”, perked up in her chair and in two tones under yelling said something like: “AH! Good you are here, sit next to us!”. Sarah and I had extensively chit-chatted the prior time I dropped in: she beat breast cancer, was about 15 years younger than my Mom, her husband was “mid”, she had a son with the same name as me who was a couple years younger than me and had a really mean girlfriend who pushed him around, she disliked beer (but not to the degree that I do), was very loud, very good spirited, tact, and was a great homie. I sat down next to the aunties.

“Aiya, are you hungry? You look tired. What you wanna eat?”

“Hmmm, ……., can I do a kimchi jeon?”

“thats good, ours is not too heavy you’ll finish it.”

“oh can I also request a bottle of soju?”

“you want a soju? sure if you want… but HAVE YOU had a “makgeolli”?”

“Makgeolli? nope… *checks menu* – oh is it like sake?”

“Yes, except its good, makgeolli is perfect for kimchijeon! Chakaman (wait one minute)”

Sarah skeddalded over to a fridge from which she procured a plastic bottle of “the good stuff”, along with a massive wooden bowl, a rather large & thick wooden ladel, and two wooden bowls – all chilled with the Makgeolli.

“This is a makgeolli, its like a Korean rice wine, this one is good, not too sweet.”

She gave the bottle a couple of gentle but forceful shakes and rotated it about what we might call the y-axis (towards space). Then she deposited about half of the contents of the 750ML bottle into the large, chilled wooden bowl. She took the ladel, sat down across from me at this inexpensive plastic sheet covered table, and started mixing the rice wine in the large bowl.

“Makgeolli has a lot of rice “sediment”, you need to really mix and incorporate”

She continued stirring the wine, then showed me how to do it, we chit-chatted about trivial stuff, and after like 5-10 minutes of straight mixing the boss lady decided that it was time.

We took our bowls and ladeled in ~two gulpfuls into each, those bowls were perfectly chilled and made from a brilliant and solid mahogany-like wood.

“should I like, drink it like a shot?”

“NO NO no no no, you take sluurrrrrrrrrp, like this see? SLLlluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp, AH!”

“mmm okay, sllluuuuuuuuuuuurrrrpp, oh SHIT YO this fire!”

“Mhm mhm mhm, perfect for days like today with rain…”

…

From there te conversation and the Makgeolli really opened up – we chatted about how awful cancer is and ailments that we all have. Sarah told me about how “naturally beautiful” it was growing up in Korea and how messed up kids these days are. She recommended that while I am ~young, I should do a bit too much drinking and dance like an idiot. She also instructed me to not spend all my time working and to find a good life partner, not just someone cute. She complained about her son’s girlfriend and I complained about how annoying self-hosting milvus was. The first bottle of Makgeolli was on the house, the second bottle and bottle of Soju were on me. We split the pajeon and had a thoroughly good time, the other two ladies joined a bit of our conversation but had their own “yapping” to attend to.

I took off about 11 PM and had one of the most wonderful and restful night’s sleep. I ended up moving from Austin to San Francisco later that summer, unfortunately this spot closed down since I moved out to the west coast. I hope that those three “ahjoomahs” closed down for reasons unrelated to their personal health and still find the opportunity to chitchat with one another.

The world is a very beautiful place – the best drink it has to offer is Makgeolli.